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Smoking
In all West’s films, she was seen at least at some point smoking a cigarette. In, I’m No
Ange,l she seductively puffs on a cigarette as she speaks to Cary Grant’s character about
coming up to talk some “business” with her. In her movie, I’m No Angel, West plays Tira
a circus performer who makes it big and becomes a lion tamer. West meets all kinds of
problems when she becomes a big time star including jealous ex-boyfriends and jealous
ex-girlfriends to the men that chase after her so often. In a review done by the New York
Times, which was written by Mordaunt Hall, it claims the film is “shameless but
thoroughly contagious humor, and one in which Tira is always the mistress of the situation,
whether it be in the cage with wild beats, in her boudoir with mistress of in a court of law.”
Although West herself never smoked outside the movie and requested that she have cigarettes
containing no nicotine, these behaviors were mimicked by people of the 1930s. As culture
changed, women became more liberated than they had ever been before and pushed the
limits of women’s equality with things like smoking in public. In the book Only Yesterday,
by Fredrick Lewis Allen, it comments on the idea of “nice” girls saying; “’nice’ girls were
smoking cigarettes-openly and defiantly.”
